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The Welcomeness Of Now

By Adam J. Pearson

"The past and present wilt—I have filled them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

(...)
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

~ Walt Whitman in Song of Myself

You may not feel it. You may feel unwelcome, as if the doors of life were closed to you. But you are welcome, here and now. The ever-presence of awareness is infinitely welcoming like the most hospitable of hosts. It allows an entire universe of form and flux to appear within it and flow through the fading of disappearance.

It holds it all and as it changes and decays, it lets it go without grasping or holding on, like a child releasing a balloon into the sky. Such is the freedom of your welcomeness here and now, and you are welcome to be free.

What is, welcomes one and all. Awareness keeps none outside the door fort here are no doors and no bouncers wait to keep you out of here and now. Anything that appears, it welcomes in. And you are it; your life is here and now. The freedom of ever-presence is yours.

In this moment, you are welcomed into presence and absence, form and formlessness, work and play, destruction and creation. You’re welcome to let your self-images go; you are that free.

You’re free to welcome your feelings. You’re free to welcome your thoughts. You’re free to welcome the sensations in your body. You’re welcome to not play by the rules that your ideas about yourself impose on your expression. No bars block out your awakeness to what is; it shines through all the gaps that somber thoughts could ever conceive to impose.

You’re welcome to move contrary to the filter that your mind imposes on your creativity. You’re so vast that you don’t need to carry around pictures of yourself, snapshots of moments in the past, sketches of moments in the future to know what you are. You can’t be fixed in a photograph or a memory film; your vibrancy is here and now. Eternal freshness is your nature.

You’re so vast that you’re wide open to all that shows up here now and that which is beyond it all. You’re so vast that the mind can never grasp you; you’re ineffable, ungraspable, great beyond conception. No image, concept, or definition can pin you down like a butterfly in a collection. Your wings cannot be clipped by thoughts that try to shoot you down. They can never reach you; the only freedom, meaning, and reality that they seem to have, is yours.

You’re so expansive that you can contain infinite images of yourself and endless freedom to believe them or drop them like a child drops a mask after the make-believe has ceased. And you’re so vast that you can even live without a single image of yourself. You’re so vast that you don’t even need ‘vast’ as an image to define you. You’re beyond definition, so vast is the freedom that you are. No word can capture you, nor can any sentence tie you up. Endlessly, they miss, like bullets fired at the sky.

You’re welcome to let your definitions of yourself burst, like tinder in a flame.

You’re welcome to let the concepts you think you need to hold on to fall away like fallen leaves in river waves.

The mind thinks that if it finds just the right label to define you, the right way to understand, then, and only then, will it be secure. It postpones your security to a future time. Where could it ever be but here, when could it ever be but now? The story of unsafety conceals the safety you could never lose.

How could you be limited to a label in the future, when your living’s happening now? Not there, but here, you are.

You are free to welcome the labels you use to think about yourself and the falling away of all your labels. Your possible expressions are infinite and boundless; nothing can limit the way life expresses except your own belief in the limitations of your stories about yourself.

The stories are remnants of the past. But freedom isn’t there. It’s here. The now is prior to the stories that drift through it in the wispy musings of a storytelling mind; this moment is unbound by tales and confabulations. And so are you.

Much more can be welcomed into the field of our awakeness than our limiting self-concepts and self-images suggest. A lot more can be let in. A lot more openness can reveal itself. A lot more depths can drop open to reveal further depths beyond depths beneath them. You can discover dimensions within you that you never thought possible. Talents can reveal themselves, hobbies can emerge out of nowhere, skills can unfold, knowledge can grow like fresh green sprouts in the fertile soil of Spring.

Without the belief in the walls that bind you, all kinds of expressions are possible. You’ll find out what they are as you watch the film of an unbound life, a life before your stories. You’ll delight in the curiosity and wonder of it all. You’ll play in the freedom of your boundless potential, dancing in and out of manifestation and creativity, action and rest. You’re welcome to enjoy the play, to delight in the dance.

No dramatic leap is necessary. Simply know that you’re welcome to watch the crutches you thought you needed to walk fall away, the concepts, the self-images, the memories, the practices, the manipulations, the props, the stories about the past and future “me.” You’re not crystallized in a distant time; you’re free and fluid now.

There is nothing to fear in the loss of crutches past. The walking will go on, but lighter than before, with less weighing it down. You need not worry about the form that life will take, the path that it will wind. You won’t even need to plan it out; it will reveal itself. It need not look any kind of way because your play can’t be fixed in a pattern; it shifts and morphs and flows in any way it will, like roots under the ground or currents in the ocean.

Such is the welcomeness of what is, the welcomeness that you are, the welcomeness of now.